Research Projects

India's heritage towns are progressively stressed by episodic waves of tourists, annual festivals, and increasing urban mobility needs, putting tangible infrastructure and intangible cultural resources at the point of critical danger. Though long-term strategic planning frameworks are in place, there exists a severe gap in real-time short-term stress forecasting and dynamic heritage-sensitive management tools. This postdoctoral research suggests the creation of a Predictive Decision-Support System (DSS) that combines AI-driven tourism forecasting, spatiotemporal stress modelling, and infrastructure vulnerability thresholds to guide tactical governance in heritage-rich urban areas. Following the previous DST-INPIRE-funded research that evaluated the spatial competitiveness of heritage towns, this project brings a paradigm shift: moving from reactive diagnostics to proactive, threshold-based mitigation. The study focuses on five case locations—Udaipur, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bishnupur, and Orchha—selected based on their heritage designation, data coverage, and institutional interventions available. It combines high-end time-series models (ARIMA, LSTM), real-time mobility and pollution data, geospatial overlays, and cultural sensitivity metrics into a combined, multi-scalar stress prediction and intervention planning model.Some of the key outcomes include: a) Real-time predictive models of tourism and transport load, b) Heritage Stress Threshold Index (HSTI) integrating environmental, structural, and perceptual measures, c) A dynamic, modular DSS with dashboard visualization and alerting mechanisms, and d) Stakeholder-calibrated toolkits for city/town-level application and public access portals. The framework is designed for direct application to national programs like Smart Cities Mission, HRIDAY, and NCAP 2023, meanwhile integrating with SDG 11.4 (heritage conservation of cultural and natural heritage). Through the integration of dynamic stress modelling in urban governance systems, the study seeks to protect risk-susceptible heritage landscapes, rationalize mobility systems, and institutionalize planning tools anticipating future shocks that can be replicated in India's historic urban agglomerations.